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Thursday, November 6, 2014

Guestpost: Sabra Waldfogel author of Slave and Sister

On the Front Line for Freedom: Albert Morgan and Carolyn
Highgate

As I researched my
novel Slave and Sister, about Jews
and their slaves in antebellum Georgia, I found some real people whose lives
were as fascinating as anything I could imagine. This is one such story.

On August 3, 1870, two people got married Jackson,
Mississippi. The ceremony was held privately at the bride’s lodgings. The newlyweds
proceeded to the train station at midnight, hoping to start their wedding trip
quietly. At the station, they were “nearly mobbed” by a hostile crowd, and the
news of their wedding traveled with them. They were reviled in the papers of
Jackson, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and even in the groom’s home town of Fox Lake,
Wisconsin.

The groom, Colonel Albert Talmon Morgan, was a Union
veteran, a Radical Republican legislator from Yazoo County, and a staunch
defender of the rights of freed slaves. The bride, Carolyn Victoria Highgate, was
a lifelong Abolitionist from Syracuse, New York, who taught ex-slave children
at the Jackson Methodist Mission.

He was white. She was black.

In Reconstruction Mississippi, interracial marriage was more
than an act of love and more than an act of faith. It was an act of great
courage. Who were these people on the front line for freedom, and what drew
them together?

Immersed in Abolition

Albert was born in upstate New York in 1842 and raised in
Wisconsin. His mother was a Quaker, who imparted to him an inner quiet and a
hatred for slavery. Like four of his brothers and one of his sisters, Albert
attended Oberlin College, one of the few 19th-century American
colleges to admit black and female students. In the 1850s it was a hotbed of
Abolitionist sentiment and activism.

Like her future husband, Carolyn was an upstate New Yorker.
Her father was born free in Pennsylvania, but her mother was from Virginia and
may have been a fugitive slave. Carolyn was born in Albany, but her family
moved to Syracuse when the Highgate children were refused admission to the
Albany district school.

Syracuse was a place of Abolitionist ferment. The family
arrived in Syracuse one year after the Jerry Rescue, one of the decade’s most
sensational acts in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act. Local Abolitionists
commemorated the event every year and kept its memory fresh until the Civil War
broke out. The Highgates joined the People’s AME Zion Church, whose minister, Jermain
Loguen, was a fugitive slave and a well-known conductor on the Underground
Railroad.

Both Carolyn and her older sister Edmonia graduated from
high school, the equivalent of a college degree today. On the eve of the Civil
War, Edmonia was the principal of a black school in Binghamton, and Carolyn was
prepared for a career as a teacher.

Soldiers against
Slavery

When the Civil War broke out, Albert dropped his studies at
Oberlin and rushed home to enlist. He saw action at the historic battles of Bull
Run and Gettysburg and was wounded at both, rising from the rank of private to
Brevet Lieutenant Colonel. After he mustered out on July 14, 1865, he had his photograph
taken. On his face was the look of dislocation and shock that the 19th
century called “soldier’s heart.”

Carolyn’s war started in 1864, when her older sister
Edmonia, sponsored by the American Missionary Association, went South to teach
the children of freed slaves. Carolyn joined her a year later. Before the war
ended she taught in war-torn Virginia, and after the war she moved to New
Orleans, roiled by racial violence, and later to Mississippi, eventually
running her own school in Jackson.

Teaching was dangerous. AMA teachers were threatened, their
students were beaten, and their schoolhouses were vandalized. Several teachers
in Mississippi were murdered. The woman who opened the schoolhouse door and
taught in defiance of Klan intimidation was as brave as the man who had picked
up a rifle for the Union. Like Albert, Carolyn had been a soldier.

Kindred Souls

They met in Jackson. After the war, Albert had bought a
distressed plantation in Yazoo County, where he built a sawmill. He employed
former slaves, paying them weekly wages and starting a school for their
children. The local planters hated him for it. His sawmill was repossessed in
1867.

Later that year, he ran for election as Yazoo County’s
representative to the Mississippi State Legislature. The black voters of the county,
who far outnumbered the white ones, supported the party of President Lincoln to
elect Albert to the legislative seat. His white neighbors were so outraged by
his victory that they jeered at him when he left for Jackson: “Polecat!
Polecat!”

He visited Carolyn’s school in 1869, recalling the meeting
in his memoir. Her little scholars sang “John Brown’s Body”, and she approached
him with the “grace of a country girl” and the “dignity of a queen.” He didn’t
care that the blood of Africa ran in her veins. He told his brother Charles
that “She is the grandest woman living.” He fell “head over heels in love with
her” and they were soon engaged.

He idealized her. He admitted to Charles that “Her breath
smells like spring violets,” adding “…guess a fellow can kiss his girl after
they’ve been engaged as long as we have.” It was tender, idealistic, and
respectful. It was a perfectly ordinary Victorian courtship, except for its
extraordinary disregard for race. Their love, like their activism, put them on
the front line for freedom.

Sources

The best source for Albert Morgan’s life in Mississippi,
including his courtship of Carolyn Highgate, is his memoir Yazoo: or On the Picket Line of Freedom in Mississippi (University
of South Carolina, 2000).

Sabra Waldfogel grew up in Minneapolis and received her
Ph.D. in American History from the University of Minnesota. Her short fiction
has recently appeared in Sixfold. Slave and Sister is her first novel.

Adelaide Mannheim and her slave Rachel share a shameful
secret. Adelaide’s father, a Jewish planter in Cass County, Georgia, is
Rachel’s father, too. Adelaide marries neighboring planter Henry Kaltenbach, a
Jew deeply troubled by slavery, and watches with a wary eye as her husband
treats all of his slaves—including Rachel—with kindness. As the country’s
conflict over slavery looms ever larger, Henry and Rachel fall in love, and as
the United States is rent by the Civil War, the lives of mistress and slave are
torn apart. When the war brings destruction and Emancipation, can these two
women, made kin by slavery, free themselves of the past to truly become
sisters?

Powerfully evoking an era of slavery and war, Slave and Sister is a story of love,
betrayal, forgiveness, and freedom.